Three years ago, Emily Bauer was an average healthy 16-year-old. But an addiction to synthetic marijuana, purchased legally from a gas station near her Cypress home, would change her life forever.
Emily and her friends had started out smoking marijuana, but she said the group eventually moved on to using other drugs.
“I was trying to get a job, and I thought the synthetic was legal, and I thought I could pass a drug test,” Emily told a crowd Thursday night at Kilgore Middle School. “The people I was hanging out with, we were doing drugs together and started off with weed, and then got harder and harder. I went to rehab and got better, but then I started synthetic (marijuana).”
She said she quickly became addicted.
Soon, she started throwing up and having severe headaches. Her parents had her evaluated and assumed the cause was migraines.
Emily kept using synthetic marijuana, until one fateful day. While smoking with her boyfriend, the drug suddenly affected her differently.
“Her boyfriend called us and said she was banging into walls and talking in jibberish,” Tonya Bauer, Emily’s mother, said Thursday. “He was honest and told us they had been smoking synthetic marijuana. He said she was urinating in a laundry basket and wouldn’t respond to him.”
Bauer was at work at the time, so she called Emily’s older brother, who was nearby, and asked him to check on her. He called 911.
“They sent five constables and two EMTs, and it took all of them to hold her down on the bed and try to sedate her,” Bauer said. “She was violent.”
Bauer immediately left work and said she couldn’t believe what she saw when she arrived home.
“It looked like a scene out of ‘The Exorcist,’ ” Bauer said. “I didn’t know anything like that could ever happen in real life. I was just standing there, crying.”
Once in the emergency room, Emily was strapped naked to a bed, but could not be calmed.
“She was like in a wild animal state,” Bauer said. “None of the sedation would work. She wouldn’t calm down, and the doctor said they needed to induce a coma for her safety.”
Subsequent tests showed damage to almost every major organ in Emily’s body.
“Her heart, lungs, kidney, liver,” Bauer said. “She had a fever. They had given her antibiotics and tried all different kinds of medicines, …Read More